The wheels on the Big Blue Bus keep falling off

Don’t get me wrong. I’ll be voting Conservative in this coming federal election. I always have. I have worked for the party and for many of its MPs.

But I am voting Conservative in spite of — not because of — the party’s increasingly meager small-c conservative credentials and a campaign that is shaping up as a greatest hits tour for Stephen Harper.

This may be the longest campaign in Canadian history — and I don’t mean the two month run-up to the election. Since we entered the era of fixed election dates, Canadians, like Americans, can now enjoy interminable election campaigns limited only by the governing party’s advertising budget. The Conservatives started early with the “Just not ready” ad about Justin Trudeau — an ad which, it turns out, foreshadowed just how bizarre and obtuse the campaign itself would be.

Those ads were bewildering when they were first aired. That they continue to run is even more puzzling. The Conservatives’ Trudeau fetish rolls on as the party strives to define the Liberal leader in a way that is at once dismissive and polite. Long after the Liberals slipped to third place in the race, the Conservatives continued to remind us that Trudeau is a handsome politician with some half-baked notions of how to run the country, totally lacking in any practical experience, focused on issues that are unimportant to Canadians and not the right choice this time around.

All very true, but … these ads are hated by the Conservative grassroots. You can almost hear the campaign money being flushed down the toilet every time one of these ambiguous clunkers is aired. The very concept being peddled in the ads is problematic and persistently annoying to Conservative voters. Not only does the bogus hiring panel presented in the ad focus on Trudeau (not NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair, the guy who’s actually leading in a lot of the polls), its conclusion implies that Trudeau will be ready to govern, someday.

Which is a weird way to frame an attack ad. When will Trudeau be ready? When Stephen Harper is no longer around? After he writes his second autobiography? This might be the first time in Canadian political history that a governing party has implicitly urged voters to cast a ballot for an opponent — not now, but later.

Harper was never a social conservative. Once, he was a libertarian. Now he’s a libertarian who thinks big government — big Harper government — is the answer to all of Canada’s problems. He has become a living, breathing oxymoron.

At any rate, it’s misleading to talk about a Conservative party campaign in 2015. This is a Stephen Harper campaign. If you understand that, you understand the thrust behind the ‘Just Not Ready’ ad: the veiled suggestion that Trudeau can have the office once Harper is done with it. This campaign just doesn’t put the leader front and centre — it focuses entirely on Stephen Harper, apparently excluding all other candidates. When Harper was in Vancouver last week, he stood — alone — against the backdrop of the Pacific Ocean. No incumbent MPs or earnest candidates by his side. The slogan attached to his podium was about him; it didn’t even mention the party.

At any rate, he’s leading a party that is conservative in name only. In a July pre-campaign announcement, Harper proudly claimed that the introduction of his government’s Universal Child Care Benefit was a “historic day” for Canada. And so it was — it was the day that a serving Conservative PM decided to define his legacy and political prospects in terms of how much money he’s willing to dump on the taxpayers who gave it to him in the first place.

So the Harper’s Greatest Hits Tour is all about how the Conservatives can spend just as well as the Liberals — maybe even as well as the NDP. Harper has already cleared the caucus of social conservatives: the list of Conservative MPs not running again is a Who’s Who of evangelical, assertively pro-life legislators in Canadian politics. Harper and the keen kids in the PMO have intimidated this crew for years.

Harper was never a social conservative. Once, he was a libertarian. Now he’s a libertarian who thinks big government — big Harper government — is the answer to all of Canada’s problems. He has become a living, breathing oxymoron.

When Conservatives campaign like reluctant Liberals or closet New Democrats, they come up short. Throughout his political career, Harper has failed to enunciate a positive brand of conservatism that inspires. We don’t hear about how getting the government out of our lives is a better and higher pursuit than creating more bureaucracy and hiring more cabinet ministers. We only hear about how Harper will spend your money and grow your government more wisely than the rest.

So the campaign stumbles on, under the watchful eyes of co-chairs Jenni Byrne and Kory Teneycke — both fierce Harper loyalists who will never, ever tell their man anything he doesn’t want to hear. Byrne, feared throughout the caucus, is perfectly at home managing an All Harper, All the Time campaign. Teneycke — fresh from the Sun News trainwreck where, as a Quebecor VP, he dictated the story line-up every day — is back dealing with the national news media that he loathes.

But with the Mike Duffy trial still in full swing and Harper’s former chief of staff Nigel Wright on the stand, it’s simply impossible to ignore the national media. As the trial focuses more and more attention on the prime minister — what he knew, when he knew it — the pitfalls of running an all-Harper campaign become obvious.

The Senate scandal certainly hasn’t been one his greatest hits.

David Krayden was raised on Vancouver Island and has written extensively on Western political issues over the years. He was a columnist for the Calgary Herald and host of Calgary’s Liberty Today radio program; more recently he worked as an editor for Sun News. Krayden was a public affairs officer in the Royal Canadian Air Force and spent almost a decade on Parliament Hill as a communications staffer.

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